Letter from Joshua Tree: Portrait of a Marriage in Wartime

P. and I lived in a glass and wood house in the boulders on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park. For a painting studio I rented a small outbuilding in town from a perfectly nice porn photographer with freckles and a Midwestern accent. We tried on the mantle of the desert lifestyle, and it fit: We bought a new pickup and a used pound mutt, a spotted bird dog named Dolly Parton. When I left New York I’d given away most of my clothes, but I brought a few totems of my Youth in The City—most memorably a pair of linen peep-toes with suede pompoms and red patent-leather slingbacks I’d bought for $85 at a Moschino sample sale—and packed them carefully away under our bed, right next to the box of shotgun shells.

We were newlyweds, and against all surface-level feminist principles, I’d left my job and life in New York to join P. in the middle of the Mojave Desert, where he was stationed with the Marines. During the day, P. trained 4-H boys from the Central Valley and gang kids from South L.A., and together they put on desert camouflage and detonated bombs on Range 410A, out in the shadow of the extinct cinder cone beyond Twentynine Palms. At night he read The Naked and the Dead and wondered, as he lay awake in the dark, if he’d have to kill someone in combat. During the day I painted and tuned out the pornographers and set my sights on MFA programs, and at night I read Joan Didion and wondered, as I lay awake in the dark, if the man I loved would be killed in combat. Portrait of a marriage in wartime.

P. left for his second deployment in early 2009 with his M16, a tattered copy of Poems, Poets, Poetry from Helen Vendler’s class, and his boys, those rednecks and gang members now U.S. Marines, brothers bonded for life. I decided to stay behind, alone in the desert, instead of returning to New York. Although “decide” is disingenuous; the week we moved to the high desert—the “hi-dez”—I knew I wouldn’t return east any time soon.

Rewind: New York, 2007. P.’s first deployment. Before we were married. I was working as a junior producer on the assignment desk at ABC News world headquarters, on the lower Upper West Side, and trying to paint when I wasn’t working, which wasn’t often. I rented a basement apartment on a soulless corner of Sixty-Eighth Street and Amsterdam; since I worked at night, the lightless bedroom at the bottom of the airshaft was ideal for diurnal sleeping if regrettable for the unrelenting cockroaches. I worked mostly with our team in Baghdad. This was during the height of the war, the era of reporting live from the Green Zone, of daily body counts of American troops on the front page of the Times. [#image: /photos/5892006b7edfa70512d68b55]|||Joshua Tree Desert Diary|||

I started work on the desk at midnight, and the first thing I did after logging on was scan the wires for IED explosions in Anbar Province. P. was somewhere in the region on the Iraqi-Syrian border, leading a platoon of Marines. My mind raced when the reports—IEDs, sniper attacks, suicide bombings, rocket-propelled grenades—invariably came in. Don’t be him don’t be him don’t be him. For those next seven months of his deployment, my adrenaline surged with every wire we brought in from the Green Zone. I was exhausted from the worry, from keeping vigil in my hope for his safety, but single-minded in my vigilance. I withdrew from Life in New York, stopped going to parties, only saw a few closest friends. I stopped painting entirely. On my rare days off I fled the city to my parents’ farm in New Jersey to work in my mom’s garden. It was only in her garden that I could have a quiet mind, where my deepening depression cleared for entire afternoons spent in the loamy Jersey soil. The world of plants was my escape hatch to order, calm, beauty. I developed an almost Asperger-like obsession with dahlias, tracking down rare hybrids and charting P.’s deployment according to my planting schedule.

Back in the city, during my daytime off hours, I couldn’t sleep. I’d scroll through my flip phone to see who I could call in the middle of the day, who could buck me up. But there is no crisis hotline for deployment anxiety. So I’d call the landline at D. Landreth Seed Co., and with the precision of the journalist I was training to be, ask Lois or Shirley which pompom dahlias they’d recommend for USDA plant hardiness Zone 6a, how to keep slugs off my Kelvin Floodlights, which dinner-plate dahlias have stems long enough for cutting. Lois and Shirley were always more than eager to share their expertise, and their voices soothed my nerves. If I closed my eyes, the rainbow of Fibonacci dahlia whorls blotted out the images imprinted on my brain of the Blackwater corpses hanging from the Fallujah bridge, and sometimes I could fall asleep.

And so it was in this way that I became a knowledgeable gardener in lieu of therapy or drugs during the time I worked for a major news network covering the details of the war in which my fiancé fought.

A year later, as P. prepared for his second deployment, we agreed that we would play the waiting part, my part, differently. In New York I was an up-to-the-minute combat newshound, and I was miserable. In the desert I completely unplugged, which is how I survived. There weren’t very many young people living in Joshua Tree then, and some older couples I met around town simply plucked me up and adopted me, invited me over for porch-sits and margaritas, hikes in Section 6, Morongo Basin Historical Society meetings. There was Mike Smiley: Vietnam vet, retired detective turned sculptor, passionate birder—the sort of unofficial Favorite Uncle of Joshua Tree. P. and I had met Mike and his wife Betty, a nurse, at a local open studio event. When P. deployed, Mike and Betty took me in. [#image: /photos/5892006cb482c0ea0e4dc9ae]|||Joshua Tree Desert Diary|||

It’s early summer, and I tag along with Mike and his crew on a sunrise bird-watching hike. “Here kiddo, I wanna show you something.” Mike breaks off a spear of blooming red penstemon from a flowering bush and hands it to me. “You gotta hold real still, and just wait. Patience, kiddo. The desert’ll teach you patience.” After a few minutes we see a flash of iridescent purple and green zip above us, and a hummingbird the size of a thimble sticks its long slender beak into a tiny red trumpet of the penstemon in my hand, vibrating in place like an early Disney cartoon, and then it’s gone.

“OK, now that’s a male Costa’s hummingbird, OK, and you’ll see them a lot in the desert here. And his neat little throat patch? The purple? Innit beautiful? That’s called a gorget. Word of the day.” Mike pats me on the shoulder and lumbers up the hill with his binoculars after a Wilson’s warbler, and I’m still standing there with the penstemon stem out in front of me, speechless.

That night my phone rings, and I jump. (I don’t get many calls.) “Come back to the city! You shouldn’t be alone!” It’s my best friend, in New York. “What are you even doing out there?” The iridescent throat of the hummingbird flashes into my mind. Gorget.

“Improving my vocabulary” seems to be the only way to answer her question. What I meant was improving my vocabulary of experience. That I don’t think I can leave the desert. But it’s hard to explain Joshua Tree to people who have never been there; you don’t want to be the guy at the party telling everyone just how amaaazing Burning Man is, or how Iyengar just completely changed your whole approach to yoga because it’s really about centering, or how once you get over the initial cravings this juice cleanse is actually unbelievable. NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR YOUR CONVERSION STORY. So I keep the story of the hummingbird and his gorget to myself, like a jewel in my pocket. The gorget becomes my secret, my new word, a mnemonic device that opens up a new way of looking, of living in this strange, magical place. +++large

In the desert I completely unplugged, which is how I survived.

P. returns from his second deployment, gets out of the Marine Corps, and we move to Jaipur for a year on grants while we apply to graduate schools. I get my MFA in studio art from NYU, P. a double-masters at Harvard, where he focuses on water policy. We see each other on weekends. At first, long-distance without combat seems mild, easy, doable, even romantic. When we’re apart we email each other listings from Zillow and tax auction sites with land for sale in Joshua Tree under $20,000, which is what we calculate we can afford with our combined savings and P’s combat pay. I love New York, and New York loves me back for the next two years, until it doesn’t.

A drizzly spring day in 2012 before my thesis is due, and P. is down in the city visiting. We take the Metro-North up to Dia:Beacon and sit in the Agnes Martin rooms, looking at those paintings that could only be made in the desert. I am overcome for many reasons and tear up on the train ride home. “Oh, it’s just this weather, and I’m so frustrated with my work, and we had studio visits with this famous asshole curator and he asked me if my paintings ‘were supposed to be dumb’ and I just said yes because I was afraid of disagreeing with him, which obviously, NO, they’re not supposed be dumb, and I hate myself for not standing up for myself, and I’m sick of living apart.”

“And?” P. knows there’s one more thing.

“And to be honest, I love New York but I don’t know if I can really stay here. I miss the desert.” He puts his arm around me and squeezes. Later that night back in Cambridge, he sends me a listing for a tiny run-down cabin on five acres just northwest of Joshua Tree. The asbestos shingle siding is the exact same faded peach color in Martin’s paintings.

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The couple purchased their 1952 homestead cabin from the family who originally homesteaded the property in 1949 under the Small Tract Act.

It’s two hours from Northeast L.A. to Joshua Tree without traffic. The first hour and a half is drudgery-at-speed, an unremarkable blur of cheap construction adobe subdivisions and big box stores. I think of Joan Didion’s description of San Bernardino County in Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream. Heat wave, murder, dead ends. The Inland Empire. Just before Palm Springs we peel north off the 10 and onto Highway 62, past the shaggy, invasive tamarisks planted by the railroad as a windbreak in the early 1900s. You can see the tamarisk breaks along the Mojave railroads from any window seat as you fly into LAX. They look like parades of dust bunnies marching across the bleak desert floor.

It’s dusk, and the engine drops into low gear as we gain a few thousand feet and pass the bar in Morongo Valley where a Marine was stabbed in the eye by a biker, past the Aztec Mobile Home Park and junk shops of Yucca Valley. At the sign for the Sky Village Swap Meet—ACRES OF BARGAINS! JUNK TO GEMS!—we turn north onto Old Woman Springs, and my heart lightens. Dolly, whose black eye patch is now streaked with silver from age, perks up, and we roll down the windows to let the hot rush of creosote air fill our lungs. As we drive deeper into the Mojave, the familiar silhouette of Black Lava Butte cuts a looming negative space, a massive black trapezoid, out of the cobalt sky. Fifty feet below us the creosote roots lie dormant, waiting for the monsoonal floods which have arrived late this year. Our high beams catch the darting, startled bodies of the night animals of the desert: kangaroo rats, coyotes, tiny burrowing owls, bats pollinating night-blooming cactus. We take the dip at speed, and hit 80 mph as we cross Pipes Wash.